Runway incursions and excursions stand as one of the greatest ongoing safety concerns to the airline industry. In recent years, runway related accidents have been responsible for more aviation fatalities than any other cause. With one incident reported, on average, every day globally, these potentially high-profile events can represent a significant cost to an airline's bottom line as well as negatively impact an airline's brand and reputation. To mitigate the risk of runway incursions and excursions, various flight crew indication and alerting technologies have been proposed. Examples of such technologies include the SmartRunway™ and SmartLanding™ systems available from Honeywell International Inc. of Morristown, N.J., USA. These technologies drastically increase safety by improving situational awareness for pilots and crew members during taxi and takeoff, approach, and landing.
Various benefits may be achieved with the use of flight crew indication and alerting technologies. For example, these technologies may provide timely positional advisories and graphical alerts to crew members during taxi, takeoff, final approach, landing, and rollout to reduce the likelihood of a runway incursion. In another example, they may provide indications and alerts when aircraft on approach are too high, too fast, or not properly configured for landing, and alerting to long landings and taxiway landings.
A fundamental basis of these technologies is a priori knowledge of the runway toward which the aircraft is approaching. Several technologies exist that allow these crew indication and alerting systems to make this determination. For example, the runway toward which the aircraft is approaching may be made known by the flight crew's entry into the flight management system (FMS) of the aircraft. In this example, the flight crew, using a primary flight display or a multi-function display of the aircraft, manually selects the destination airport, as well as the landing runway at the destination airport. In another, example, the runway toward which the aircraft is approach may be automatically selected by the aircraft based on various algorithms that utilize criteria such as aircraft position, altitude, descent/ascent rate, airspeed, and heading.
Various flight scenarios exist, however, where a change to the landing runway is made by the flight crew after already being established on the approach to another runway. One example of such a situation is the “side-step” approach. Side-step approaches may be performed at airports that have parallel runways, wherein the aircraft is initially cleared to approach a first of the two parallel runways, and subsequently “side-steps” to the other of the two parallel runways for landing. Under such scenarios, indication and alerting systems that are based on the flight crew's FMS runway entry would begin to generate unwanted alerts as soon as the aircraft begins the side-step manoeuver, unless the flight crew makes an effort to change the runway in the FMS (which would need to occur while the flight crew is required to perform various other tasks, such as landing checklists and briefings). Alternatively, indication and alerting systems that are based on the aircraft's automatic selection would begin to generate unwanted alerts if the algorithm is not accurate enough or timely enough to recognize the new (parallel) runway selection.
As is generally appreciated by those skilled in the art, undue or “nuisance” indications and alarms during landing are a distraction to the flight crew and contribute to stress attendant to a successful landing. Additionally, the nuisance indications and alarms may distract from critical alarms sounding in the cockpit. Therefore, it would be desirable to provide improved flight crew indication and alerting technologies that are capable of recognizing a side-step approach and providing only the indications and alerts that are relevant to the aircraft's approaching runway. Furthermore, other desirable features and characteristics of the exemplary embodiments will become apparent from the subsequent detailed description and the appended claims, taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings and the foregoing technical field and background.